Archives for: 2007

When wondering round town today I came across a massive iMac banner in the Drakes Circus Shopping Mall. There’s nothing like a one story high iMac to get your attention. This is advertising a new Apple Reseller in Plymouth, more good news after hearing that an actual Apple Store will be opening up in Exeter soon. The iMac in the banner didn’t come out very well in the picture so I cropped it out.

Apple Reseller (Plymouth, UK)

Inside sources have also suggested that someone called Sean King will be the new manager of the Exeter store! The Plymouth reseller store will be run by Stormfront Technology Ltd. who are currently based in Exeter. I’m guessing they’re setting up shop in Plymouth due to the Official Apple store moving in on their turf. They should be opening in November in time for Christmas and currently have several job vacancies!

Today from 12:30pm for an hour, Terry Pratchett was in WH Smiths at Plymouth, signing books as part of a promotional campaign for his new release; Making Money. I had popped in Waterstones beforehand to grab a copy of his new book, and also a copy of Good Omens; one of my favorite Pratchett books. I already own a copy but it is a bit dog-eared after years of solid use, so I figured I needed a nice new copy anyway. Its a good book with sophisticated dark humor, and the same style of wacky characters as all of Terry’s other books.

Terry Pratchett signing a copy of his new book; Making Money.

We were all slightly disappointed as Terry was missing his trademark black hat. This surprisingly made him extremely hard to recognize, as you can probably see from the photo above. He was very friendly although he didn’t say anything to me personally. I think I may have somehow offended him with asking him to sign Good Omens, as it is co-written by Neil Gaiman and not one of his usually more popular Discworld series.

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I received a new iPod shuffle in the post about a week ago now, just in time for The Final Conflict paintball event. It was the red edition, complete with www.richarddavey.com domain name engraving.

iPod Shuffle (PRODUCT) RED

It’s a bit pricey considering what it is, especially when you take into account that most places now sell ’stick’ MP3 players for around £10. You can even pick one up at Tescos with your weekly shopping! However, this is an Apple product and like all the others before it, there’s more than meets the eye.

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It’s been a full week now since The Final Conflict 2007, and I’ve finally completed my personal vendetta of getting a photo gallery up to host all the pictures taken over the weekend. I selected Pixelpost as the photoblog of choice since it initially looked simple and easy to integrate. After a week of University inductions, Paintball Club meetings, Freelance Project work and generally just hacking around with the gallery PHP and HTML code I got it all working … to an extent.

Laying out a plan of action at Alpha Base, The Final Conflict 2007

Feel free to head over and check out the pictures on my gallery subdomain by clicking here. I haven’t yet had chance to write descriptions for all 105 photos yet, since I’ve manually been through each to crop and upload them.

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Some of you may have noticed a new addition to my blog, a Digg panel on the right sidebar. This show the most recent articles I’ve dugg on the digg website.

Digg Logo

For those of you new to Digg, it’s a user-generated, community-driven syndication website which also provides several successful social networking aspects. If you don’t quite understand what that means or want to find out more, take a look at the Wikipedia page!

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Had a good game of paintball with PUPS and Going Postal this Sunday at Adrenalin Games in Exeter. It was good fun, but no one seemed to be playing at their best. It was the most painful games I’ve played to date, got some nice bruises to prove it too! Out of all the fields I’ve played so far, this had to be one of the best areas I’ve played on. It’s mainly based in an urban setting with loads of real obstacles such a cars, tanks and brick house ruins. I may be slightly biased or just bad at spotting targets in a forest of trees, but I’m not normally one for woodsball scenario paintball.

PUPS and Going Postal at Adrenalin Games, Exeter (UK)

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On my journey of AJAX discovery a week ago, I came across Mootools. “MOOTOOLS??” I hear you cry, “but thats been out for ages!” It has been out a while now, but they seem to have greatly improved the included functionality and cut down on the package size. You can even customize the package for download directly from their site, so you only get the features you need. You only need to have a quick browse around the demo page to get a feel for the endless possibilities available at your fingertips.

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented JavaScript framework.

Previously, I used script.aculo.us, but have since found it to be a fairly large and cumbersome package. It tends to slow IE down a considerable amount, which you definitely don’t want if you’re trying to convert one time visitors. I’ve worked with it for a while now and it seems outdated and has in the past been extremely hard to extend.

Back to the point of this article, I wanted to discuss JavaScript classes. JavaScript isn’t the best when it comes to trying to apply Object Orientated techniques, but Mootools helps by improving the JavaScript concept of classes and help cut out a lot of the fuss.

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It’s that time in the year where the car needs a service. Unfortunately, this normally also means a costly MOT, and renew of road tax. I’ve only owned my current car a year; a Black Mitsubishi Colt CZ2. It was brand new, now only a year old so at least that crosses the MOT off the list. I took my car to the same dealer that I purchased it off originally. My girlfriend phoned it in and got the service will all the works and courtesy car for £209. They had already picked out the rental car for me by the time we arrived, and what car did they pick to replace the 1300cc Colt?

Mitsubishi Colt CZ2

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I ordered around £100 worth of kit off the Dye UK paintball website on Friday and I was fairly worried today, since there was a 1-2 day delivery and nothing had showed up. I thought it was fairly strange when I put the order through and I didn’t receive any form of receipt or confirmation.

Dye Elemental Jacket 2007

I emailed Jeff Abbot the head of operations this morning, and received a response only an hour later. Talk about surprising, eBuyer support might get you a response to an ‘eNote’ after at least a minimum of 2 days processing with a nobody on the other end.

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I received my University enrollment pack in the post this morning. I was a bit surprised, since I accepted their offer over a month ago and this has been the first I’ve heard from them. As from the 17th September, I will be required to complete my enrollment by attending the introduction programme, and then I’ll be fully signed on the MSc (to further become a MRes) degree in Web Technologies and Security!

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The new iMacs were released today, but from the early pictures and reviews I’ve seen, I’m yet to be impressed. The iMac to me, has always seemed to be a bit on the bulky side. Even when you consider the fact they’ve managed to squeeze an entire computer into the small space of a monitor.

The new iMac

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I was checking my website rank on google the other day and SHOCK! realized that my rank had dropped a few places! It seems that the other Richard Davey also has a blog and has outdone me promoting it. After a quick read, I was pleased to see that he has made some interesting points.

There was an interesting debate on which was easier to read between concatenation and interpolation concerning PHP standard coding practices. I disagree with Richard and prefer concatenation myself. It may not look as neat, but due to the syntax colouring given by my PHP editor it makes it easier to glance over. I use Zend Studio as my PHP editor, although since my switch to a mac I’ve been told to change to TextMate, but thats another story for another blog post!

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The previous version 1.0.0 has only been out for a month and the community have already released an update. This mini release provides a fix for the some 33 known issues and also includes a few improvements. I’ve been playing with an installation of the framework over the last month and can see straight away that it’s a fairly powerful tool. However, there is still room for lots of improvement which I will detail over the next few weeks.

The Zend Framework, Download it NOW!

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Booked my ticket for the paintball scenario game the other day. It’s £45 for the weekend and guarantees a bunch of nice paintball shaped bruises! I’m heading up to Wakefield on the 16th September with the nice guys from P.U.P.S. aka U.P.P.C.

A UK Paintball Sports Federation Accredited Event

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echo "HELLO WORLD";

Just finished skinning my blog to look like my homepage, as many of you may have noticed who originally clicked through from www.richarddavey.com. For those who didn’t, feel free to take a quick nose around to get the lowdown on my hobbies, computing background and current coding projects.

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